According to a post by Rick Sternbach, the USS Relativity of the same era was armed with phaser strips and a nose temporal/subspace disruptor according to this scetch. [8]

Descriptions and uses

Phaser rifle, 2370s

The phaser beam could stun, heat, kill, or disintegrate living creatures. Phasers could damage shields or other systems or even cut through a hull. Phasers could also be used to cut through walls and burrow through rock. The beam could be focused to a single spot or widened to impact a large area.

In the nadion particle beam phasers, plasma was passed to a phaser emitter resulting in a discharge of nadion particles. Residual particles could be found in places where a battle had recently taken place. The disruptive effects of nadion discharges were moderated to produce varying effects (discussed below), ranging from benign to extremely destructive. (VOY: "Phage", "Memorial", "Endgame")

The visual effect of the standard beam of a Starfleet hand phaser has been depicted in The Original Series sometimes as a red beam, in "The Changeling" for example, a blue beam in "The Galileo Seven", or a green beam such as in the "Wink of an Eye"; in some episodes there was no visual beam at all, only the impact on the target that gave off a blast of light such as in "Whom Gods Destroy". Later on, in TNG: "The Best of Both Worlds", it was established that the color of the beam depended on the resonance frequency the phaser was tuned on. From TNG onwards, Starfleet phaser beams were depicted almost exclusively as orange-red in color.

Different models of phasers made different sounds when fired, depending on the model and setting. Federation phaser fire typically made a high-pitched "whistling" or "tearing" sound, for example. A knowledgeable person could use the sound to differentiate between types and power settings. (TOS: "Errand of Mercy"; TNG: "Too Short a Season"; DS9: "Sacrifice of Angels")

The alternate Enterprise firing all phasers

In the alternate reality created by Nero's temporal incursion, hand phasers of the late 2250s emitted concentrated bolts of phaser energy rather than the steady streams generated by phasers of the prime reality.

An alternate reality phaser pistol

In addition, these phasers had a rotating nozzle which flipped when set from stun to kill or vice versa. The ship-mounted phaser banks aboard the USS Enterprise were also used to fire bolts resembling proximity blasts. (Star Trek)

The hand-held phaser design used aboard the Vengeance was devised by prop designer John Eaves. He was not told all the information about how the prop would be used, designing it merely as a form of "dark phaser" implemented by Starfleet. "Almost as soon as I started to put pencil to paper I was asked to start working on the new [...] hand phaser," Eaves said. "The early designs were based on a handyman’s all-in-one pocket tool that had inspired Scott [Chambliss'] [...] imagination." Eaves did a first-pass illustration of the phaser for Chambliss, the production designer on Star Trek Into Darkness. [9] (The concept image can be viewed here.)

The weapon used by Soran was inconsistently identified as both a phaser and a disruptor in the script of Star Trek Generations, [10] though it did fire similar blasts as the phaser rifles featured in subsequent films.

Hand phasers could be made to overload, either deliberately or by sabotage. Phasers in the process of overloading emitted a distinctive high-pitched whine. The weapon released all of its energy in an explosion capable of doing considerable damage to its surroundings. In 2266, Lenore Karidian attempted to murder James T. Kirk by hiding an overloading phaser in his cabin. (TOS: "The Conscience of the King") In 2269, Kirk, McCoy, and Sulu were almost killed while on the Kalandan outpost planet, when its defensive computer fused the controls on Kirk's phaser, causing it to overload. (TOS: "That Which Survives")

According to Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, one possible method to overload a phaser involved disengaging the safeties that normally managed the phaser's power system. This allowed energy to be transferred from the power cell to the prefire chamber then back into the power cell faster than the cell could reabsorb the energy, causing the cell to overload.

Like the transporters and sensors, hand-held and starship-mounted phasers were also inoperative in areas with high levels of hyperonic radiation, because the phaser beams were randomized by the radiation. To compensate, it was possible to modify a phaser with a servo circuit that continuously recollimated the output. Neural subprocessors of Soong-type androids could be utilized as these servos. (TNG: "The Ensigns of Command")

Starship-mounted phasers were normally set to fire steady streams. They could also be set to fire concentrated bolts of phaser energy that detonated at a specific point in space known as proximity blasts. In addition to the powerful settings, the ship's phasers also had a stun setting that could be used to render lifeforms unconscious when fired at a planetary surface from orbit. (TOS: "Balance of Terror", "The Trouble with Tribbles", "A Piece of the Action")

Setting 3.1 was enough to cause a Changeling to experience similar discomfort. Setting 3.4 or 3.5 was determined to be a stun setting that would effectively stun and force any Changeling to revert back into the gelatinous state. (DS9: "Homefront") A wide-field stun setting was used when large groups needed to be stunned with a single shot. (TOS: "The Return of the Archons") Some stun settings could also cause unconsciousness. Although mostly harmless when used at these low settings, multiple phaser stuns like this could result in injury and death. (TNG: "Samaritan Snare") There was a heavy stun force setting and a maximum stun setting also known as full stun charge. (TOS: "Tomorrow is Yesterday"; TNG: "Legacy"; TAS: "The Eye of the Beholder") The highest stun setting was strong enough to immobilize a soong-type android. (TNG: "A Matter of Time")

One-quarter and level 10 were names of the kill setting for humanoid forms. (TOS: "The Man Trap"; TNG: "Aquiel") The kill setting on hand phasers used by the Mordanites had a distinct sound from the stun setting. (TNG: "Too Short a Season") To a humanoid infected by a neural parasite, the kill setting only caused unconsciousness, due to the high levels of adrenaline in the target's body. However, extended exposure to a body part such as the head of a humanoid would cause it to explosively vaporize. Two phasers set to kill could also disintegrate smaller lifeforms such as the neural parasite mother creature with extended exposure. (TNG: "Conspiracy")

According to the script of "The Vengeance Factor", [11] the Human vaporization setting was called setting 8.

The standard level 16 setting on a type 2 phaser could be used to vaporize tunnels through rock large enough to crawl through. (TNG: "Chain of Command, Part I") The level 16 wide-field setting could easily destroy half of a large building with a single shot. (TNG: "Frame of Mind") However there were materials phasers couldn't cut through even at this maximum level, such as toranium (DS9: "The Forsaken") and the unknown material used to create the Hotel Royale on Theta VIII. (TNG: "The Royale")

Types of phaser weapons

The diagram of the ship-mounted phaser bank on Constitution-class starships

Constitution-class forward phaser bank in a schematic

Enterprise phaser banks disintegrating a building

There were several numbered types of phasers of increasing size and capability: types 1, 2, and 3 were personnel phasers, and types 4 and above were ship-mounted weapons. The phasers mounted aboard starships were considerably more powerful than those used by Starfleet personnel, owing to the increased power reserves available. Early phasers, such as the MK IX/01 type found on the USS Enterprise, were mounted in banks of one or two emitters.

The only picture so far shown of a starship's phaser emitter is found in the episode "The Trouble with Tribbles", where Scotty is looking over a diagram clearly marked as a "MK IX/01" phaser diagram. The diagram itself, however, was taken from maintenance manual for one of the large-scale water heaters found on Desilu's production lots.

According to Ben Burtt, for the Original Series, "the steady blast of the phaser was derived from the hovering sound of the Martian war machines made for the 1953 version of Paramount's War of the Worlds. The original was made with tape feedback of an electric guitar and a harp." For Star Trek, Burtt said, "the steady sound just wasn't the right way to go because the visuals are so different, so I made something that recalls it, but features a Doppler effect and is shorter and sharper. My sounds were added to those that had already been supplied by Mark P. Stoeckinger and Alan Rankin". Stoeckinger stated that "Harry Cohen made tonal sounds with a concussive element that served what the phaser was doing along with adding a version of that neo classical space phone-like element that Ben Burtt provided to give the phaser roots in the franchise along with adapting it for the current film." [12][13]

Establishing phaser technology

During The Original Series, the mechanics of phasers were never explained on screen. However, as early as the release of The Making of Star Trek in 1968, the technology behind phasers was explained. Phasers are, according to the book, basically lasers, but they have the beam set on a pulsating frequency that can be specifically set to interfere and interact with the wave pattern of any molecular form. This is called "phasing" the beam frequency, hence the name phaser.

According to Gene Roddenberry in The Making of Star Trek, two days into filming of the second pilot, they realized that three years later, people were going to say, "Oh, come on, lasers can't do that." The term was consequently substituted, based on the idea of the phasing principle of physics, which is a way of increasing power. Apparently, Roddenberry was talking of using higher phase velocities (aka frequencies) of light that, in turn, consist of higher energy photons. These accounts suggest that the laser weapons seen in "The Cage" and phasers of the rest of the show were possibly just two different terms for the same thing.

Released in 1979, the Spaceflight Chronology (p. 173) offers an alternative explanation of the technology. It states that phaser weapons were in fact developed by Starfleet to combine the benefits of two previously used weapon technologies: particle-beam cannons and laser banks. While particle weapons delivered a big punch, they had trouble penetrating shields, whereas lasers penetrated shielding easily, but had very little impact force to do damage. Two years after the events of "The Cage", when the problem with frequency aligning the two systems to work simultaneously in ship-mounted phasers was solved, the development of hand phasers began. This timeline for phaser development would, however, not be compatible with canonical accounts, as we saw ship-mounted phasers used by the USS Kelvin in the 2009 film Star Trek, over twenty years before the events of "The Cage".

The 1991reference bookStar Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual (pp. 123-125) explain the inner mechanisms of a phaser in more elaborate detail. "Phaser" is, according to the book, an acronym for "phased energy rectification" – named for the process of turning stored energy into an energy beam without an intermediate transformation. Energetic plasma is pumped to a prefire chamber made out of a superconducting lithium-copper. There, it undergoes a rapid nadion effect in which strong nuclear forces are liberated. A protonic charge forms and is released in pulses to the emitter made out of the same superconductive crystal. A beam of elecromagnetic energy is released from it, at the speed of light. On starships, energy for phasers originates from the EPS, while on hand units, the charge of energetic plasma is stored into sarium-krellide. This material is used because it can't accidentally release the charge of plasma.

Dialogue in the 1991 episode TNG: "The Mind's Eye" concerning the internal mechanics of a type 3 phaser rifle confirm, canonically, all the elements as they were established in the Manual. However, in Star Trek, phasers have been regularly used while starships travel at warp speeds, so the beam must also be traveling at faster-than-light velocities. Beginning with the 1993 episode TNG: "Inheritance", instead of being labeled as EM weapons, as the reference works have stated, phasers have been consistently referred to as particle beam weapons on screen. This information was also included in the 1994Star Trek: Voyager Technical Manual - Writer's Guide, and has been corroborated in Star Trek: First Contact and such episodes as "Time and Again", "Memorial", and "Endgame".

Even though the phaser beam was canonically established as not a beam of pure EM energy but a particle beam of nadions, the 1998 reference book Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual still goes on to describe the phaser beam as an EM energy beam. According to page 84 of the Manual, a phaser beam can be delivered at warp speeds due to an annular confinement beam jacket and other advances in subspace technology. These are stated to be new inventions in the late-24th century. However, considering that first on-screen uses of phasers at warp occurred as early as the first season of The Original Series, this timeline for the invention would be inconsistent with canon. Furthermore, according to page 92 of the Manual, when phasers are fired by a ship with deflector shields active, the beam is frequency locked to the second-order harmonics of the shield emissions. This prevents the beam impacting on the shields and overloading them, or rebounding back at the firing ship.

Phaser settings

The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual (pages 135 - 137) lists various settings for type 1, type 2, and type 3 phasers, some of which have not been mentioned on screen and some which have been given a different effect. Type 1 phasers had the first eight settings; type 2 and 3 phasers had all sixteen settings.

Light Stun - causes central nervous system impairment on humanoids, unconsciousness for up to five minutes. Long exposure by several shots causes reversible neural damage.

Medium Stun - causes unconsciousness from five to fifteen minutes. Long exposure causes irreversible neural damage, along with damage to epithelial tissue.

Disruption Effects - causes heavy alloys and structural materials to absorb or rebound energy. There is a 0.55 second delay before the material vaporizes.

Explosive/Disruption Effects - causes ultra-dense alloys and structural materials to absorb or rebound energy before vaporization. There is a 0.2 second delay before the material vaporizes. Approximately ten cubic meters of rock are disintegrated per shot.

Explosive/Disruption Effects - causes ultra-dense alloys and structural materials to absorb or rebound energy before vaporization. There is a 0.1 second delay before the material vaporizes. Approximately fifty cubic meters of rock are disintegrated per shot.

The Star Fleet Technical Manual gives the effective ranges for different settings. On the type 1 phaser they were: stun - thirty meters, heat - two meters, disrupt - twenty meters, dematerialization - ten meters. On the type 2 phaser the ranges were: stun - ninety meters, heat - six meters, disrupt - sixty meters, dematerialization - thirty meters. Setting dials on the hand phasers indicated nine settings on the type 1 phaser and fifteen on the type 2 phaser, of which all above ten were labeled by the letters A through E. The letters might be a reference to the disruptor-B setting mentioned in "Obsession", which would make it setting 10B. According to Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, the hand phasers used during the first four movies had only three preset levels: stun, disrupt, and dematerialize.

Commenting on phaser firepower, Ronald D. Moore said: "The weapons are way too powerful to present them in any realistic kind of way. Given the real power of a hand phaser, we shouldn't be able to show ANY firefights on camera where the opponents are even in sight of each other, much less around the corner! It's annoying, but just one of those things that we tend to slide by in order to concentrate on telling a dramatic and interesting story." (AOL chat,1997)

Other types of starship phasers

Type V phaser was used on auxiliary craft. In Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual it was stated that type 7 shuttlecrafts and type 9A cargo shuttles used phaser emitters of this type during special operations. According to Star Trek: Starship Spotter the Chaffee shuttlepod and the Delta Flyer also used this phaser type.

Type VI phaser was used on auxiliary craft and runabouts. According to the Star Trek: Starship Spotter, the Aeroshuttle and Danube-class starships phaser arrays were of this type.

Type VII phaser was used on starships. According to the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual and Star Trek: Starship Spotter, the twin phaser banks on Miranda-class starships were of this type.

Type IX phaser is used on starships. According to the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual, the Ambassador-class, Centaur-type, Curry-type, and one type of Excelsior-class variant used them. The phaser emitters in the rotary weapon arrays of the weapon sail towers of Deep Space 9 were of this type.

Type X phaser was used on starships. According to Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, this was the type name of the phaser arrays used on the Galaxy-class starships. According to the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual the Akira-class, Norway-class, Nebula-class, Saber-class, Soyuz-class, and one type of Constitution-class variant also used them. The fixed phaser emitters in the weapon sail towers of Deep Space 9 were of this type. According to Star Trek: Starship Spotter, the Intrepid-class and Nova-class also used them.

Type X+ phaser was used for planetary defense. According to Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, this was the designation of some large dedicated planetary phaser defense emitters.

Type XI phaser was normally used for planetary defense. According to the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual', the emitters were designed to minimize atmospheric blooming of the beam. The phaser emitters in the carriages, embedded into the habitat ring of Deep Space 9, were of this type, modified for use in space.

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